Iowa Voters

Iowa’s Secretary of State recently placed before us some new rules on the handling of our vote manipulating devices. One of the proposed rules says this: “Only a person who is authorized in writing by the commissioner to do so shall be permitted to attempt to repair malfunctioning voting equipment.”

This vague standard will not protect us from the roving technicians deployed by the vendors of our voting equipment. It is common for the vendors to hire temporary help at Monster.com, give them cursory training, send them out to polling places as trouble shooters, and charge counties a pretty price for their services. On Tuesday one such technician confessed his ignorance to a pollworker in Maryland, not knowing his confession would appear on the internet:

Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to “help”, and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn’t seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, “one day.” I said, “You mean they hired you yesterday?” And he replied, “yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on.” I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it’s too compressed.” Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn’t doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn’t see him again.

As you can see, these people should not have access to the equipment at the polls, even if they do have written permission. Since Iowa’s new rule is up for public comment, now is the time (comments close next Tuesday) to tell the SoS that written permission is too weak a standard. Only regular election personnel should be tweaking the gadgets once the pre-election testing has been completed.

Comment to Sandy Steinbach at sos@sos.state.ia.us

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Why We Fight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.